As any dog owner is well aware, a favorite pastime enjoyed by virtually all canine pets is to retrieve objects thrown by the pet owner. In most instances, the pet owner will tire long before his or her dog as most people are not conditioned to repeatedly throw objects long distances. Some pet owners resort to the use of tennis rackets and bats and, in either case, the pet owner must still deal with picking up the object to re-throw it which can oftentimes be covered with dog saliva.
There have been attempts in the past to create products which have been specifically designed for improving the ball fetching experience. One such product is described in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,076,829. As described in the '829 patent, the ball throwing apparatus includes an elongated shaft with a flexible upper neck portion extending from a handle portion and, intricately formed over the distal end of the neck portion, is a rigid half-spherical structure which acts as a ball engaging means designed to snap-fit around a standard tennis ball. Although this product improves the ball-fetching experience, it is fraught with limitations which the present invention is intended to overcome.
Fundamental among those limitations is that the product described and claimed in the '829 patent has a spherical structure sized to rigidly retain a tennis ball. As such, not only is this product limited to the use of a standard tennis ball but if a tennis ball is new and thus possesses a thick, dense covering, the ball can lodge within the half-spherical structure and not optimally release as intended by the user. Conversely, if a ball is well-worn, its outer dimension could very well be reduced resulting in the ball releasing prematurely while not maintaining contact with the half-spherical structure as intended. The outer ball dimension can also be influenced by the extent that the ball is pressurized and noting that the apparatus is intended to be used with a canine pet, tennis balls can oftentimes be punctured during vigorous activity which would affect the tennis ball-spherical structure interface yet further.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a universal launcher which overcomes the limitations described above.
It is yet another object to the present invention to provide a universal launcher which is not limited to accepting and selectively launching standard tennis balls but which can be used to launch objects of various configurations including those which are not necessarily spherical.
These and further objects will be readily apparent when considering the following disclosure and appended claims.